Tomorrow, Ubuntu's second 'long-term support' release, 8.04 or Hardy Heron, will propagate its way through the list of mirrors. OSNews took a short look at the beta release of Hardy Heron a few weeks ago, and concluded that "All in all, this release packs some interesting new features and frameworks, some of which should have been part of any Linux distribution three years ago. It is quite clearly a beta though, and definitely not ready yet to be labeled as a 'long term support' release." In anticipation of the release, El Reg caught up with Mark Shuttleworth in London.

Shuttleworth advocated the idea of the major Linux distributions synchronising their release schedules, which would enable easier collaboration between the various distributions. Ubuntu is willing to alter their own release schedule to make such a synchronisation a reality.

Timing your releases drives a whole bunch of things. It means a greater ability to collaborate on bug fixes. If we are on the same versions of the Linux kernel, it is a lot easier for us to say, 'Hey, here is this patch to make this device work. Do you know any reason why we shouldn't put it in?'

El Reg continues, confronting Shuttleworth with Martin Owens, the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo leader. Owens said that PulseAudio, one of the big new features in Hardy Heron, produces a lot of problems instead of fixing any of the long-standing audio issues in Linux. Just like ALSA, OSS, and ESD, PulseAudio is 'just' another audio system, and instead of it being a replacement for the other three, it is added as the fourth audio subsystem, making the whole audio landscape even more intricate than it already was. Shuttleworth agrees the situation is "messy", and joked "I am glad you are not into video editing because the story there is worse".

Ubuntu Hardy Heron will be released tomorrow, so stay tuned for a review round-up from across the net - and there will be reviews, trust me.